A common activity for any business or enterprise is to receive and pay several invoices from outside suppliers or creditors. A business or enterprise often spends a considerable amount of time processing and making payments on the invoices. Various managers may have to review an invoice for accuracy and then send it to another person to approve it for payment. Once the invoice has the proper number of signatures, the invoice is deemed accurate and is approved for payment.
Both the supplier and the business incur substantial costs in billing and paying for invoices in this manner in this environment. This process has been largely manual and time consuming, has resulted in lost productivity and has virtually eliminated any possibility of providing for prompt payment of invoices. Worse, invoices occasionally get paid twice.
Electronic systems have been introduced to overcome some of these problems and disadvantages in the invoicing process. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,826,542 issued to Kenneth L. Virgin et al. However, applicants have concluded that this and other known electronic invoicing systems have several drawbacks.
In general, known electronic invoicing systems have limited functionality related to the processing of invoices. Such limited functionality is disadvantageous because when users and administrators discover that certain functions cannot be performed with the software, or are difficult to perform with the software, they tend to revert to previous manual methods to perform those functions, thus leading to a general reluctance to utilize the electronic invoicing system to its fullest extent.
As one example, oftentimes all of the data related to an invoice to be paid is not located in the electronic invoicing software or in the software suite containing the electronic invoicing software. Related information is often stored in a data source that is remote from such software and must be separately retrieved, thereby negating some of the potential of an electronic invoicing system.
As another example, there are often literal discrepancies between electronic invoices and related information supporting that payment of the invoices is proper. These literal discrepancies might cause an invoice to be rejected in an electronic invoicing system, whereas the discrepancies might be recognized as being insignificant when manually reviewed by a person. Such discrepancies can occur in the descriptions of goods and services or in other parts of the invoice. Also, an invoice may frequently not correspond with a single purchase order or transaction receipt since it may in fact matches against several purchase orders or transaction receipts.
As one particular example of the non-workability of prior electronic invoicing systems, it should be considered that in a purchase order-based procurement process, the invoice from the supplier can be matched to the purchase order and/or a receipt of the transaction to determine if the invoice should be paid. Acceptable tolerances can be established on description, price, quantity, etc. to determine if the invoice matches (within this tolerance) the data element(s) shown on the Purchase Order and/or receipt. Since the Purchase Order and receipts are transacted by the buying company, if the invoice(s) from the supplier matches, it is deemed to be accurate and is approved for payment.
However, an enterprise typically pays invoices for goods and services that are not associated with a purchase order or transaction receipt. There are typically many Suppliers usually including utility companies, telecommunications, emergency maintenance, marketing services, outside contractors, banks, and other external service providers which do not use purchase orders or transaction receipts (sometimes referred to as “spend categories”). If there is no prior purchase order or transaction receipt, there is no way to do a two way or three way match between an invoice and the prior purchase order or transaction receipt. If the invoice is not provided pursuant to a previous purchase order, problems are more likely to occur.
The approval of such non-purchase order invoices is not facilitated by known electronic invoicing systems, and requires a different process that is not fully accommodated and seamlessly integrated into a single electronic invoicing system. Known electronic invoicing systems focus on processing only these types of invoices or require users to awkwardly transition between two separate invoicing processes that are noticeably different from each other in several respects.